Fake followers + fighting fraud: avoiding the pitfalls of influencer marketing

By Adam 'Sven' Williams, CEO, Takumi 16 Aug 2019

Amber Love Island fake followers Takumi MAD//Fest

As influencer marketing continues to grow and companies invest more, they expect more, including assurances that impressions and engagements are real.

Influencers are great at talking to their audiences. So how are brands deciding who to work with and how are they assessing their worth?

Too many brands are using subjective assessment of influencers and pitching them based on their follower count. This approach is crude because influencers are more than just their follower count and the obsession with it is one of the reasons, we have fraud in the industry.

When planning influencer marketing campaigns, analysing every influencer thoroughly is key to ensure that who you work with will ultimately maximise the return on investment. Here are three tips to help identify the most impactful influencers and avoid fake followers:

  1. Fraud = Bot followers
    They can fall into three distinct categories; bought, inflated through exchange schemes like pods, and bots that just sit there through no voluntary action from the influencer.

    It can be difficult to distinguish between these three categories. Instagram has advanced their bot detection and today prune accounts from bot followers on an ongoing basis. However, there is a need to dig deeper, at Takumi we have integrated analytics auditor, HypeAuditor into our platform which uses machine learning to detect similarities between accounts that indicate bot-like behaviour. This gives us estimates of ratios between genuine followers and bot followers.

  2. Demography / Geography
    It’s key to understand the demography and geography distribution of the audience. Again, tools like HypeAuditor can help trace patterns that indicate demographic and geographic distribution within an audience base.

    However, the gold standard for this information today is to acquire a screenshot of the influencer's Business Account stats shared directly by Instagram. In many cases, brands are working with influencers without knowing the percentage of real, reached and desired followers.

    Knowing this information, it can be used to your advantage when negotiating with influencers and prioritising outreach.

  3. Brand match / Targeting
    So, who are the remaining followers? They’re not bots, they’re in the demographic and geographic target area, and they’re actually seeing the post.

    But we still need to ensure the influencer aligns to the brand and reaches the potential consumers that will relate to the brand in some way. This is one area that is hard to make judgement calls for, and we rely on subjective assessment of the imagery and the personality expressed by the profile.

    No pick is perfect but increasing the quality of the match will help ensure less attrition at this step.

    Assessing follower counts and visuals alone won’t do much to support a successful campaign with real engagements and impressions.

    It’s important to consider all of the factors that make up an Instagram profile with a large following and brands need to make sure that they do proper due diligence for every influencer well before a campaign goes live.

Adam Williams, CEO of Instagram influencer marketing service Takumi. You can meet the Takumi team at MAD//Fest London on 13-14 Nov.

 

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